20 Oct 2015
Amazon, the amorous legislator and loose threads
Sports fans may get excited over spotting something like back-to-back sacrifice bunts. I geek out over spotting two instances of the loose threads defense in the same week. First, mighty Amazon responds to a New York Times article. The original article came out in August. It said Amazon’s success was built in part on pushing
30 Jun 2015
Why The Plain Dealer will miss having Thom Fladung around
The set of all great managers and the set of all newsroom managers have a fairly small area of intersection, in my experience. One of the great ones is leaving, so that intersection is getting even smaller. Thom Fladung returned home to Northeast Ohio as managing editor of The Plain Dealer in 2011. I worked
28 Jun 2015
Snopes.com deserves a Pulitzer: True
Last week was a great time for news — fake news, that is. Misinformation is spreading faster than measles in a colony of anti-vaccine nudists, so the time has come for something long overdue: a Pulitzer for Snopes.com. This weekend Jim Romenesko pointed to nytimes.com.co, which had several of my Facebook friends fooled with claims
27 Jun 2015
This is how easily visual data can mislead
After the Supreme Court decision declaring bans on gay marriage unconstitutional, Bloomberg Business dusted off a pretty example of visual data journalism. Which sucks. Data journalism done well is powerful. Intelligent visual display of that data often can tell a story better than plain words. As with any form of journalism, though, decisions about what
29 May 2015
Personal Outrage journalism and the cost of cognitive dissonance
Stories of Personal Outrage (PO) are quite the rage on social media. Old media dip their ladles into the same deep pool. Reporters who try to balance the clickworthiness of a PO’d person’s claim with old-school values such as, you know, reporting, must suffer horribly from cognitive dissonance. Take this story from The Telegraph: “United
07 Apr 2015
Rolling Stone’s problems are journalism’s problems, too
Like many other journalist, I read the Columbia Journalism School’s report on the Rolling Stone rape story and was appalled. But even as thorough an analysis of it as Jay Rosen’s on his PressThink blog leaves me thinking the reaction is missing the point. Yes, Rolling Stone screwed up. Yes, the errors its reporter and
20 Feb 2015
‘Why bother’ reporting sets journalism gold standard
Brayden Olson is a real person who has many similarities with one of the main characters in “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Or not. Business Insider, an operation I know mostly from the frequency with which its posts show up in the news feed on Yahoo’s homepage, says that Brayden Olson says he’s just like Christian
05 Jan 2015
Let’s say goodbye to the man on the street
The voice of the people is the voice of God, says the proverb — in Latin, vox populi vox Dei. Hence the term “vox pop” used by some in broadcasting for a reporting method also known as man-on-the-street (MOS) or man-in-the-street. Balderdash, says I. Vox populi vox ignorantiae: The voice of the people is the
03 Dec 2014
5 questions about Rolling Stone’s gang-rape reporting (updated twice)
Last month, Rolling Stone published a frustrating story by Sabrina Rubin Erdely about a young woman who said she was gang-raped on the campus of the University of Virginia. The story was, at first, frustrating because it depicted a university stuck in the Stone Age, unwilling to deal properly with sexual assault, and a campus
30 Sep 2014
Death to the inverted pyramid; life to alternative story forms
I have a hate/hate relationship with the inverted pyramid. I hate the fact that this artifice, created to deal with ancient mechanical issues, is still being justified to journalism students today based on ex post facto reasoning. And I hate the way alternative forms, often based on actual reader habits, are so often derided as